A conventional Power Distribution Unit (PDU) is an assembly of electrical outlets (also called receptacles) that receive electrical power from a source and distribute the electrical power to one or more separate electronic appliances. Each such unit has one or more power cords plugged in to one or more of the outlets. PDUs also have power cords that can be directly hard wired to a power source or may use a traditional plug and receptacle connection. PDUs are used in many applications and settings such as, for example, in or on electronic equipment racks. One or more PDUs are commonly located in an equipment rack (or other cabinet), and may be installed together with other devices connected to the PDU such as environmental monitors, temperature and humidity sensors, fuse modules, or communications modules that may be external to or contained within the PDU housing. A PDU that is mountable in an equipment rack or cabinet may sometimes be referred to as a Cabinet PDU, or “CDU” for short.
As mentioned, computing facilities generally include electronic equipment racks, such as standard RETMA racks, that commonly comprise rectangular or box-shaped housings sometimes referred to as a cabinet or a rack and associated components for mounting equipment, associated communications cables, and associated power distribution cables. Electronic equipment is commonly mountable in such racks so that the various electronic devices are aligned vertically one on top of the other in the rack. Often, multiple such racks are oriented side-by-side, with each containing numerous electronic components and having substantial quantities of associated component wiring located both within and outside of the area occupied by the racks. Such racks commonly support equipment that is used in a computing network for an enterprise, referred to as an enterprise network.
In many cases, computing facilities such as server farms or data centers support large networks, referred to as enterprise networks. Enterprise networks exist to support large world-wide organizations and depend on a combination of technologies, e.g., data communications, inter-networking equipment such as frame relay controllers, asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) switches, routers, integrated services digital network (ISDN) controllers, and application servers, and network management application software. Such enterprise networks can be used to support a large company's branch offices or campuses throughout the world and, as such, these networks have become mission critical to the functioning of such organizations. Masses of information are routinely expected to be exchanged, and such information exchanges are necessary to carry on the daily business of modern organizations. For example, some international banks have thousands of branch offices placed throughout Europe, Asia and North America that each critically depend on their ability to communicate banking transactions quickly and efficiently with one another and with their respective headquarters. A typical enterprise network uses building blocks of router and frame relay network appliances mounted in equipment racks. Such equipment racks are distributed to remote point of presence (POP) locations in the particular network. Each equipment rack can include, for example, frame relay controllers, routers, ISDN controllers, servers, network attached storage devices, etc., each of which are connected to one or more power sources.
Many equipment racks may be located in a data center, each of which having one or more associated PDUs. One or more such data centers may serve as data communication hubs for an enterprise. On the other hand, more than one enterprise may use computing facilities in a data centers. In any event, a particular enterprise and/or a particular data center may have a large number of equipment racks and associated PDUs. Furthermore, many PDUs include network connections that provide for remote control and/or monitoring of the PDUs. Such PDUs generally have configurations that are programmed into the PDU such as, for example, network communication configurations, alarm threshold configurations, control configurations, etc. As mentioned, a particular enterprise and/or data center may have numerous PDUs, which may each need to be programmed with configuration information. Traditionally, each PDU is required to be programmed individually by initiating a programming session and then programming the PDU. Furthermore, any time configuration information is required to be updated, each PDU traditionally is required to be individually updated. As will be recognized, such a task may consume significant amounts of time when being performed on hundreds, or even thousands, of PDUs that may be located in one or more data centers, for example. Additionally, when new data centers are brought on-line, or additions to data centers are brought on-line, the pressure to get equipment installed and running often results in PDUs that are not configured, even though such PDUs have the capability to provide information and be controlled over the network. In some cases, even after the data center is brought on-line, such PDUs may not be configured, or are eventually configured after a relatively long time period, due to higher priority tasks to be performed by data center personnel.